What is Dr. Lilly Jay planning to do with her very new, very public platform? Well, it’s a work in progress.
“I am actively trying to figure out what it means to have any degree of a voice, especially one that I sort stumbled into and didn’t really ask for,” she tells me over Zoom.
A few years ago, Jay lived a happy life of anonymity, working as a psychologist specializing in perinatal mental health, focusing on her private practice, and raising her young son. But then her personal life was thrust into the spotlight after she experienced a public breakup, an experience she detailed for the first and only time in an essay for New York Magazine late last year.
Readers, especially women and mothers, responded overwhelmingly to Jay’s poise, grace, and heartfelt depiction of the struggles of the postpartum period. But after the essay came out, Jay was left with a question: What now?
Sure, she could never speak publicly about anything ever again. But the feedback to her essay moved her and made her consider what using her voice could mean.
Her conclusion? “I want to be responsive to the things that keep me up at night,” she says.
What’s keeping Jay up at night is the struggle facing most American mothers. As someone who has spent her career helping to care for women as they go through the transformation from pregnancy to birth and through their child’s first year, she has witnessed firsthand the lack of mental health support that her patients face as well as the systemic gaps that lead to parental burnout and crises. It doesn’t feel like she can stay silent.
“It feels like it is a particularly hard time to parent right now,” she says. “We’re seeing social support systems decimated and this move towards glorifying motherhood without talking about it, valuing it, or making it possible in any meaningful way. And so, it feels urgent right now to say and do things that are going to be helpful in my very small piece of this puzzle.”
It’s true that American parents are struggling. As the US Surgeon General declared last year, parental burnout is now a public health crisis. In his warning, then-Surgeon General Vivek Murthy cited lack of social services, high costs of childcare, nonexistent safety nets, and technology concerns as just some of the things that are making American parenthood literally hazardous to our health. Couple this with the right-wing, pro-natalism currently spreading through the Trump administration, and it’s never been a more urgent time to speak out about the mental health of parents, especially mothers.
As a practitioner, Jay has watched in horror as key resources that help parents have vanished from government websites, and she’s concerned it could only get worse.
“We are at a point of collapse and change right now where good science is going to be less available to people,” she says.
It’s the moment, she thinks, to use her public voice for good. So, Jay has decided to join the medical board of a science-backed parenting platform, Riley, in order to help bring its suite of mental health support to more parents nationwide. The app, which was previously only available in beta mode via a waitlist, is open to the public as of Wednesday.
Amanda DeLuca founded Riley in November 2023 after her own experience with postpartum depression. When DeLuca, a former Etsy and NerdWallet product lead, was in the throes of her mental health struggle following the 2022 birth of her daughter, she recalls spending hours doomscrolling the internet, simmering in her myriad anxieties of what could happen to her baby.
It’s not an uncommon experience—many moms admit spending way too much time googling their fears plus Reddit, spiraling down a rabbit hole of toxicity that makes their condition worse, not better. What Riley aims to do, DeLuca tells me, is provide a science-based, all-in-one parental advisory platform to provide support that reduces the mental load of constant optimization and worry.
“What you should be getting out of using the app is just more joyful time with your children and feeling more confident, making good decisions, and just spending really quality time with them,” DeLuca tells me.
Or, more plainly, helping parents to put down their phones. It’s one of the things that Jay sees in her practice that she wants to help alleviate.
“As a clinician, I hear so many patients contend with the constant work of trying to sort through the entire Internet’s worth of knowledge about parenting,” she says. “Then they get to a point where they’re too exhausted to do anything with the information, and they’ve also lost a lot of time and either maintained or amplified their own anxieties in the constant searching. Getting a good clear answer that you can do something with, and is in conversation with whatever you are still tracking about your baby, frees you up to get back to the important work that will never be replaced by an app, which is parenting.”
Speaking publicly about these issues, Jay thinks, is a first step to determining what this next phase of her life will look like. She grows most passionate when speaking about the myriad of crises facing her patients and American mothers at large, noting that our country currently has “maternal mortality and morbidity rates, especially for women of color that are unconscionable.”
Even with all of her resources and privilege, Jay says, when she gave birth to her son she was not always believed when she talked about what she was experiencing in her own body. In the hospital, she repeatedly told her medical team that she felt something was wrong, only to be told she simply had a headache from the dry hospital air. She actually had preeclampsia, a dangerous and serious pregnancy complication.
To Jay, something needs to change. Starting with making our healthcare system “more responsive to the full complexity of pregnancy.” It will not only make the women safer, but will make them better mothers.
“I think about parenting as sort of pouring and pouring and pouring into someone else’s cup,” she says. “And you need to do that from a place of feeling like you have your own dignity, you have your own experiences of being taken care of.”
Does Lilly Jay plan more public-facing advocacy work? We’ll see.
“I think I have stumbled into a strategy of answering the door when someone knocks,” she says. “I do feel deeply, deeply committed to the private work of being a psychologist, and I quite like that. Probably my most meaningful successes are immeasurable and by design completely private. It is happening in my clinical work, and it’s happening at home in my parenting, so I feel quite happy with that. And then, I am excited to look towards what room I can be in.”
The post Lilly Jay Never Asked for the Spotlight—But She’s Ready To Speak Up appeared first on Glamour.
